Home networks including TVs that may communicate with various devices such as disk players, digital video recorders (DVR), personal computers, and the like can be difficult for non-technical users to set up and manage. Indeed, even technical users often encounter frustration in setting up and managing home networks.
Among the difficulties in managing home networks is that of resource management. For example, it might happen that a movie a user wishes to view on his TV is available on both a DVD player and a DVR, but the user typically has no way of knowing which device would be optimum to use from a bandwidth standpoint. Indeed, bandwidth considerations can change over time, as playing a movie from the DVD player might at one point in time result in the most optimum network bandwidth allocation while at a later point in time the optimum bandwidth allocation might be achieved by playing the same movie from the DVR.
Moreover, as intimated by the discussion above, it can happen that the network contains more than one storage device, and that duplicate copies if the same piece of content might be stored on more than one device. This might be desirable in some cases and undesirable in others, but regardless, users typically have little or no tools to help them manage home entertainment network storage. With the above critical recognitions in mind, the invention herein is provided.